morrowlife

Here’s Reader Number One practicing for a brilliant future in bank robbery. Best of luck with that. He might want to remove the tags before his first job.

Today went from a gray, rainy – but warm – morning to a warm, beautiful sunny afternoon. We’re not expecting the beautiful weather to last any longer. My friends at the Weather Channel are predicting daytime temperatures in the 30’s and 40’s with nighttime lows in the 20’s for the next several days. That’s more normal winter weather around here, but we’ve gotten to like the other stuff. It’s not normal to have spring fever in February!

The Dave Barry book is gradually improving. I’ve actually had more enjoyment than annoyance at the last couple of chapters. He’s just wearing his hatred for Ronald Reagan on his sleeve a little too much (the book was published in 1985). The ironic thing, of course, is that the things that Dave and all the other newspaper people were mocking President Reagan about turned out to have been brilliant ideas that liberated millions of people from Soviet oppression. That doesn’t leave Dave looking too bright, now does it? At least he had a lot of company back then.

I’ve been trying to get Mark’s school computer back on the road after a catastrophic hard disk crash. It’s taking a very long time, but the machine is now running and currently downloading and installing all the Windows patches (27 and counting). It refuses to install Microsoft Office, so we’ll have to call the K-12 help desk and see if they have any ideas, like another copy of the installation CD. It took quite a while to get the wireless card set up, but that’s working now. I first tried installing the driver from its CD, but that installed a bunch of garbage I didn’t want and that kept the Windows wireless manager from working. When I uninstalled the garbage, it also uninstalled the driver. So, I had to restart the machine and wait for it to ask for a driver, at which time I inserted the card’s CD and let Windows find the driver for itself. Voila! It’s working.

Now the biggest problem is unbelievably sluggish performance. Hopefully, we can work on some optimizations and get it back to working like it did before. Very odd, that.

Dessert time – we have some fresh-baked cookies tonight that are crying out to be sampled. Bye.

Here’s something a little bit different – an old tile roof. Talk about your Great Art, huh?

Came home from work early today. I was feeling pretty sick to my stomach, unfortunately. Things are much better this evening. Thanks for asking.

We went over to look at a very old pickup truck (an ’89 Dodge D50 built by Mitsubishi) for sale this afternoon. It looked pretty good for a truck with nearly 200,000 miles on it – no rust to speak of except on the bumpers and exterior mirrors, and it started right up. However, I think I detected a slight smell of anti-freeze in the exhaust, and the automatic transmission is slipping like crazy, making its value about negative $2000. No bid from me. Some friends have a minivan for sale that we’re now thinking about. I could probably use a pickup more than a minivan, but the price is pretty good and the van appears to be in pretty good shape. We’re looking for something cheap and reliable that Reader Number One can drive when he gets to the right age (soon), so its utility to me in the meantime is of lesser importance. Besides, who says you can’t haul a load of manure in a minivan?

Ice cream is waiting. Later.

Doesn’t it look like they were having a great time on last weekend’s Klondike Derby? No? Well, appearances can be deceiving. We actually had a great time! I’ll try and post some pictures of the actual Klondike part over the next few days.

It wasn’t quite as busy a day at work today. I made additional progress on my ICD signoff, had a little conflict with my former coworkers in Colorado and Virginia, and prepared for tomorrow’s telecon with our Japanese customers at 7:30 pm our time. I have a feeling I’ll be doing lots of phone calls from home with these folks – the time zone difference seems to dictate it.

Time to go to Young Men. So long.

Here’s the waterway they used to feed the waterwheel that powered the bellows at Hopewell Furnace. Pretty cool thing. And don’t readers One and Two look nice?

Busy day today. I’m trying to coordinate the signoff of one of my launch vehicle Interface Control Documents (along with about a ton and a half of other things) and I spent most of the day twisting arms on the phone, via email, and in person. I’m making progress, though. Strange as it may seem, I’m exhausted from the mental effort. I don’t want to think tonight. (Yeah, I know, why should tonight be different from any other night? Har har har.) Well, at least I’m home for almost all of the month of February. Gotta take my happiness where it presents itself.

Reader Number One and I visited the Beerys tonight. We’re ashamed because it’s the last day of the month, and we’ve promised ourselves to visit our Home Teaching families by the tenth. Our only excuse was that I was gone so much of the month and they were busy too. They’re a really nice family. Glad to know them.

Time for a bowl of ice cream, my new (old, actually, but I’ve never read it) Dave Barry book, and bed. A word about the Dave Barry book, though: it’s not nearly as good as his later work, which makes sense. It feels like he’s trying harder for laughs, and it also feels like he has a serious lack of good judgment. Still, I like Mr. Barry’s work in spite of what a dope he was as a younger man. Of course, he’s probably still a dope – he just learned not to show it in his work. That’ll have to do.

No posts for several days! Sorry about that, dear readers. As mentioned previously, I was in Denver for a couple of days, Cocoa Beach for a couple of days, and on a Scout campout for a couple of days. How the time flies. It turns out there was plenty of high-speed internet service in Florida, but there was too little time. It’s always something.

Here’s a picture of Reader Number Two (he has very reflective eyes!) relaxing on one of the comfortable cots in the leader’s cabin at Camp Kirby, where Troop 262 spent the night on Friday before tackling the Klondike Derby on Saturday. Only it wasn’t too Klondikey, with temperatures in the 50’s on Saturday. Still, we did our best and had fun. Sadly, our numeric results were lower than last year’s, but you can’t win them all. We’ll get ’em next year. Maybe. Number Two looks a little nervous here because the two big guys on the upper bunk looked like they might be coming through at any moment.

Florida’s weather was nice. I stayed at the Cape Winds, which is right on the ocean. I like having an apartment there rather than just a hotel room for a long trip, so I’m willing to do without the Marriott points that would otherwise build up pretty fast during a launch campaign. I’m looking forward to my next campaign being here in the United States rather than some remote location. I don’t have to be away from home for as long as usual, and it will be almost like normal life! Restaurants! Stores! People! Streets! Ocean! Comfort! Not too shabby.

Time for bed. Bye.